Response

I have done little reading or anything else this week… I always feel a little uncomfortable when you respond to things I’ve said involving Proust, because he’s often implicated in the various supplements, interpretations and tangents I’ve hung on to him before he got to you. I think intensity of thought and experience was more central to him than time – true intensity only came about in solitude. That said, time does interest me, as does a goal of perfection. I realize that live performance is all about moment and experience, that a live performance is not supposed to stand as a monument – it is moving rather than static, and it makes sense to say that in an experience like that is, in a sense, lived rather than examined ‘perfection’ seems like a less relevant concept. Still… (and I’ll digress before saying what I was about to say, with aside about perfection, and our blog which is conceived of as a conversation, where I write down ideas I would usually never write down in such a half-baked form, where amidst all sorts of nonsense come things that are headed in the right direction but still wrong because of the formulation, because they seeds of ideas and unprocessed observations that haven’t really been checked or analyzed. This blog is a rejection of perfection for the sake of exchange. If we each waited until we had something polished and convincing to send, we wouldn’t get nearly as much insight into each other’s thought development as I think and hope we will this way. The downside is that I do already often feel embarrassed about what I’ve written, am writing or even am about to write – I’ll have to stop talking about that though… and just come back to stuff like my comment on Plato which I feel have to be lifted out of the half-idiot state they’re now in)… I think in talking about time and improvisation, you are also party touching on the difference between craft and inspiration – which is not to say that there is no craft in live performance and in improvisation, quite the contrary, but when people praise immediacy, movement and unreflected creation in art, there usually is some lingering background thought of the divine breath entering the body, of some sacred space being tapped and our highest selves being released. I think of renaissance debates on the relative merits of ‘nature’, meaning talent, and ‘art’ or artifice, meaning work and carefully acquired skill. I think of surrealist automatic writing, and Breton being ashamed of his initial desire to correct or polish lines in ‘magnetic fields’, which sort of went against the point of the experiment, and I think of Jack Kerouac claiming that he taped countless sheets of paper together so that while writing ‘On the Road’ in a mad continuous fit he wouldn’t have to pause to change sheets in the typewriter (did he claim to have written it in a day or something like that?). This is linked in too many people’s minds far too often to things like altered states, drugs and so forth, and sometimes a belief that brilliance is all in the unconscious and can express itself without thought. Of course there is such a thing as talent, of course over-analyzing what you are writing often ruins it, makes it contrived and unnatural, and of course when you are in the middle of creating something worthwhile often, though not always, you do feel almost like you are on things, what you are working on starts taking form and you don’t feel that it is entirely of your own doing, it can seem necessary, natural – but still, I have an almost protestant devotion to the idea of craft, of work, of revision. I think this is in part because I put too much stock in romantic notions of genius when I was very young, and not believing that there was such a thing as craft in writing kept me from actively learning it when it would have come quickest and easiest – and when I didn’t have other responsibilities to distract me from it. In performance the hard work of the craft comes through repetition – drilling into yourself gestures, ideas and structures that you can always fall back on, and also cultivating a certain style and rhythm of thought. Repetition, like revision is a circling back, revisiting, and each revisiting leads to refinement towards impossible and unreachable perfection – which is a necessary thought even if its realization is an absurd thought, as undesirable as it is impossible. Though mystical inspiration would seem to be more closely linked to speed or the moment and humble craft to taking time and proceeding with care – an ideal of perfection is linked to them both and never attained by either. I’m not going to talk about perfection just yet – it will involve another equally long tangent and there is something else I planned to write about…

But now that I’ve already composed something so long, I don’t think I’m going to start writing about Sade just now as I planned to. I’ll do that tomorrow and then maybe perfection or Plato on the weekend.